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The Customs of the Noble Ones

The Story of a Thai Forest Tradition
Throughout its history, Buddhism has worked as a civilizing force. Its
teachings on karma, for instancethe principle that all intentional actions have
consequenceshave taught morality and compassion to many societies. But on a
deeper level, Buddhism has always straddled the line between civilization and
wilderness. The Buddha himself gained awakening in a forest, gave his first
sermon in a forest, and passed away in a forest. The qualities of mind he needed
in order to survive physically and mentally as he went, unarmed, into the wilds,
were key to his discovery of the Dhamma. They included resilience, resolve, and
alertness; self-honesty and circumspection; steadfastness in the face of loneliness;
courage and ingenuity in the face of external dangers; compassion and respect
for the other inhabitants of the forest. These qualities formed the home culture
of the Dhamma.
Periodically, as Buddhism spread and adapted to different societies, some
practitioners felt that the original message of the Dhamma had become diluted.
So they returned to the wilderness in order to revive its home culture. Many
wilderness traditions are still alive today, especially in the Theravada countries
of Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia. There, mendicant ascetic monks continue to
wander through the remaining rainforests, in search of awakening in the same
environment where the Buddha found awakening himself. Among these
wilderness traditions, the one that has attracted the largest number of Western
students, and is beginning to take root in the West, is the Kammatthana
(Meditation) Forest tradition of Thailand.
The Kammatthana tradition was founded by Ajaan Mun Bhuridatto in the
early decades of this century. Ajaan Muns mode of practice was solitary and
strict. He followed theVinaya (monastic discipline) faithfully, and also observed
many of what are known as the thirteen classic dhutanga (ascetic) practices, such
as living off almsfood, wearing robes made of cast-off rags, dwelling in the
forest, eating only one meal a day. Searching out secluded places in the wilds of
Thailand and Laos, he avoided the responsibilities of settled monastic life and
spent long hours of the day and night in meditation. In spite of his reclusive
nature, he attracted a large following of students willing to put up with the
hardships of forest life in order to study with him.
He also had his detractors, who accused him of not following traditional Thai
Buddhist customs. He usually responded by saying that he wasnt interested in
bending to the customs of any particular societyas they were, by definition, the
customs of people with greed, anger, and delusion in their minds. He was more
interested in finding and following the Dhammas home culture, or what he
called the customs of the noble ones: the practices that had enabled the Buddha
and his disciples to achieve awakening in the first place. This phrasethe

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customs of the noble onescomes from an incident in the Buddhas life: not long
after his awakening, he returned to his home town in order to teach the Dhamma
to the family he had left six years earlier. After spending the night in a forest, he
went for alms in town at daybreak. His father the king learned of this and
immediately went to upbraid him. This is shameful, the king said. No one in
the lineage of our family has ever gone begging. Its against our family customs.
Your majesty, the Buddha replied, I now belong, not to the lineage of my
family, but to the lineage of the noble ones. Theirs are the customs I follow.
Ajaan Mun devoted many years of his life to tracking those customs down.
Born in 1870, the son of rice farmers in the northeastern province of Ubon, he
was ordained as a monk in the provincial capital in 1892. At the time of his
ordination, there were two broad types of Buddhism available in Thailand. The
first can be called Customary Buddhismthe mores and rites handed down over
the centuries from teacher to teacher with little, if any, reference to the Pali
Canon. For the most part, these customs taught monks to live a sedentary life in
the village monastery, serving the local villagers as doctors or fortune tellers.
Monastic discipline tended to be loose. Occasionally, monks would go on a
pilgrimage they called dhutanga which bore little resemblance to the classic
dhutanga practices. Instead, it was more an undisciplined escape valve for the
pressures of sedentary life. Moreover, monks and lay people practiced forms of
meditation that deviated from the path of tranquillity and insight outlined in the
Pali canon. Their practices, called vichaa aakhom, or incantation knowledge,
involved initiations and invocations used for shamanistic purposes, such as
protective charms and magical powers. They rarely mentioned nirvana except as
an entity to be invoked for shamanic rites.
The second type of Buddhism available at the time was Reform Buddhism,
based on the Pali canon and begun in the 1820s by Prince Mongkut, who later
became King Rama IV (and still later was portrayed in the musical The King and
I). Prince Mongkut was ordained as a monk for twenty-seven years before
ascending the throne. After studying the canon during his early years as a monk,
he grew discouraged by the level of practice he saw around him in Thai
monasteries. So he reordained among the Monsan ethnic group that straddled
the Thai-Burmese border and occupied a few villages across the river from
Bangkokand studied Vinaya and the classic dhutanga practices under the
guidance of a Mon teacher. Later, his brother, King Rama III, complained that it
was disgraceful for member of the royal family to join an ethnic minority, and so
built a monastery for the Prince-Monk on the Bangkok side of the river. There,
Mongkut attracted a small but strong following of like-minded monks and lay
supporters, and in this way the Dhammayut (lit., In Accordance with the Dhamma)
movement was born.
In its early years, the Dhammayut movement was an informal grouping
devoted to Pali studies, focusing on Vinaya, the classic dhutanga practices, a
rationalist interpretation of the Dhamma, and the revival of meditation

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techniques taught in the Pali canon, such as recollection of the Buddha and
mindfulness of the body. None of the movements members, however, could
prove that the teachings of the Pali canon actually led to enlightenment.
Mongkut himself was convinced that the path to nirvana was no longer open,
but he felt that a great deal of merit could be made by reviving at least the
outward forms of the earliest Buddhist traditions. Formally taking a bodhisattva
vow, he dedicated the merit of his efforts to future Buddhahood. Many of his
students also took vows, hoping to become disciples of that future Buddha.
Upon disrobing and ascending the throne after his brothers death in 1851,
Rama IV was in a position to impose his reforms on the rest of the Thai Sangha,
but chose not to. Instead, he quietly sponsored the building of new Dhammayut
centers in the capital and the provinces, which was howby the time of Ajaan
Munthere came to be a handful of Dhammayut monasteries in Ubon.
Ajaan Mun felt that Customary Buddhism had little to offer and so he joined
the Dhammayut order, taking a student of Prince Mongkut as his preceptor.
Unlike many who joined the order at the time, he wasnt interested in the social
advancement that would come with academic study and ecclesiastical
appointments. Instead, his life on the farm had impressed on him the sufferings
inherent in the cycle of life and death, and his single aim was to find a way out of
the cycle. As a result, he soon left the scholarly environment of his preceptors
temple and went to live with a teacher named Ajaan Sao Kantasilo (1861-1941) in
a small meditation monastery on the outskirts of town.
Ajaan Sao was unusual in the Dhammayut order in that he had no scholarly
interests but was devoted to the practice of meditation. He trained Ajaan Mun in
strict discipline and canonical meditation practices, set in the context of the
dangers and solitude of the wilderness. He could not guarantee that this practice
would lead to the noble attainments, but he believed that it headed in the right
direction.
After wandering for several years with Ajaan Sao, Ajaan Mun set off on his
own in search of a teacher who could show him for sure the way to the noble
attainments. His search took nealy two decades and involved countless
hardships as he trekked through the jungles of Laos, central Thailand, and
Burma, but he never found the teacher he sought. Gradually he realized that he
would have to follow the Buddhas example and take the wilderness itself as his
teacher, not simply to conform to the ways of naturefor nature is samsara
itselfbut to break through to truths transcending them entirely. If he wanted to
find the way beyond aging, illness, and death, he would have to learn the lessons
of an environment where aging, illness, and death are thrown into sharp relief.
At the same time, his encounters with other monks in the forest convinced him
that learning the lessons of the wilderness involved more than just mastering the
skills of physical survival. He would also have to develop the acuity not to be
misled by dead-end sidetracks in his meditation. So, with a strong sense of the

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immensity of his task, he returned to a mountainous region in central Thailand
and settled alone in a cave.
In the long course of his wilderness training, Ajaan Mun learned that
contrary to Reform and Customary beliefsthe path to nirvana was not closed.
The true Dhamma was to be found not in old customs or texts but in the welltrained heart and mind. The texts were pointers for training, nothing more or
less. The rules of the Vinaya, instead of simply being external customs, played an
important role in physical and mental survival. As for the Dhamma texts,
practice was not just a matter of confirming what they said. Reading and
thinking about the texts could not give an adequate understanding of what they
meantand did not count as showing them true respect. True respect for the
texts meant taking them as a challenge: putting their teachings seriously to the
test to see if, in fact, they are true. In the course of testing the teachings, the mind
would come to many unexpected realizations that were not contained in the
texts. These in turn had to be put to the test as well, so that one learned gradually
by trial and error to the point of an actual noble attainment. Only then, Ajaan
Mun would say, did one understand the Dhamma.
This attitude toward the Dhamma parallels what ancient cultures called warrior
knowledgethe knowledge that comes from developing skills in difficult
situationsas opposed to the scribe knowledge that people sitting in relative
security and ease can write down in words. Of course, warriors need to use words in
their training, but they view a text as authoritative only if its teachings are borne out
in practice. The Canon itself encourages this attitude when it quotes the Buddha as
teaching his aunt, As for the teachings of which you may know, These teachings
lead to dispassion, not to passion; to being unfettered, not to being fettered; to
divesting, not to accumulating; to modesty, not to self-aggrandizement; to
contentment, not to discontent; to seclusion, not to entanglement; to aroused
persistence, not to laziness; to being unburdensome, not to being burdensome: You
may definitely hold, This is the Dhamma, this is the Vinaya, this is the Teachers
instruction.
Thus the ultimate authority in judging a teaching is not whether the teaching can
be found in a text. It lies in each persons relentless honesty in putting the Dhamma
to the test and carefully monitoring the results.
When Ajaan Mun had reached the point where he could guarantee that the
path to the noble attainments was still open, he returned to the northeast to
inform Ajaan Sao and then to continue wandering. Gradually he began to attract
a grassroots following. People who met him were impressed by his demeanor
and teachings, which were unlike those of any other monks they had known.
They believed that he embodied the Dhamma and Vinaya in everything he did
and said. As a teacher, he took a warriors approach to training his students.
Instead of simply imparting verbal knowledge, he put them into situations
where they would have to develop the qualities of mind and character needed in
surviving the battle with their own defilements. Instead of teaching a single

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meditation technique, he taught them a full panoply of skillsas one student
said, Everything from washing spittoons on upand then sent them into the
wilds.
It was after Ajaan Muns return to the northeast that a third type of
Buddhism emanating from BangkokState Buddhismbegan to impinge on his
life. In an effort to present a united front in the face of imperialist threats from
Britain and France, Rama V (1868-1910) wanted to move the country from a loose
feudal system to a centralized nation-state. As part of his program, he and his
brothersone of whom was ordained as a monkenacted religious reforms to
prevent the encroachment of Christian missionaries. Having received their
education from British tutors, they created a new monastic curriculum that
subjected the Dhamma and Vinaya to Victorian notions of reason and utility.
Their new version of the Vinaya, for instance, was a compromise between
Customary and Reform Buddhism designed to counter Christian attacks that
monks were unreliable and lazy. Monks were instructed to give up their
wanderings, settle in established monasteries, and accept the new state
curriculum. Because the Dhammayut monks were the best educated in Thailand
at the timeand had the closest connections to the royal familythey were
enlisted to do advance work for the government in outlying regions.
In 1928, a Dhammayut authority unsympathetic to meditation and forest
wanderers took charge of religious affairs in the northeast. Trying to domesticate
Ajaan Muns following, he ordered them to establish monasteries and help
propagate the governments program. Ajaan Mun and a handful of his students
left for the north, where they were still free to roam. In the early 1930s, Ajaan
Mun was appointed the abbot of an important monastery in the city of Chieng
Mai, but fled the place before dawn of the following day. He returned to settle in
the northeast only in the very last years of his life, after the local ecclesiastical
authorities had grown more favorably disposed to his way of practice. He
maintained many of his dhutanga practices up to his death in 1949.
It wasnt until the 1950s that the movement he founded gained acceptance in
Bangkok, and only in the 1970s did it come into prominence on a nationwide
level. This coincided with a widespread loss of confidence in state monks, many
of whom were little more than bureaucrats in robes. As a result, Kammatthana
monks came to represent, in the eyes of many monastics and lay people, a solid
and reliable expression of the Dhamma in a world of fast and furious
modernization.
Buddhist history has shown that wilderness traditions go through a very
quick life cycle. As one loses its momentum, another often grows up in its place.
But with the wholesale destruction of Thailands forests in the last few decades,
the Kammatthana tradition may be the last great forest tradition that Thailand
will produce. Fortunately, we in the West have learned of it in time to gather
lessons that will be help in cultivating the customs of the noble ones on Western
soil and establishing authentic wilderness traditions of our own.

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Perhaps the most important of those lessons concerns the role that the
wilderness plays in testing and correcting trends that develop among Buddhists
in cities and towns. The story of the Kammatthana tradition gives lie to the facile
notion that Buddhism has survived simply by adapting to its host culture. The
survival of Buddhism and the survival of the Dhamma are two different things.
People like Ajaan Munwilling to make whatever sacrifices are needed to
discover and practice the Dhamma on its own termsare the ones who have
kept the Dhamma alive. Of course, people have always been free to engage in
Buddhist traditions in whatever way they like, but those who have benefited
most from that engagement are those who, instead of reshaping Buddhism to fit
their preferences, reshape themselves to fit in with the customs and traditions of
the noble ones. To find these customs isnt easy, given the bewildering variety of
traditions that Buddhists have spawned over the centuries. To test them, each
individual is thrown back on his or her own powers of relentless honesty,
integrity, and discernment. There are no easy guarantees. And perhaps this fact
in itself is a measure of the Dhammas true worth. Only people of real integrity
can truly comprehend it. As Ajaan Lee, one of Ajaan Muns students, once said,
If a person isnt true to the Buddhas teachings, the Buddhas teachings wont be
true to that personand that person wont be able to know what the Buddhas
true teachings are.
Thanissaro Bhikkhu